Description

ABOUT RIGHTSCON
Access held the first RightsCon in Silicon Valley in 2011 and the second regional conference in Rio in 2012. The first two events were sold out with more than 400 opinion leaders from across the sector and the world in attendance. This year's event will move back to Silicon Valley, leveraging the experiences of the two conferences that came before it.

From March 3-5, 2014, at Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco, we will feature thought leaders, highlight emerging voices, host strategy and implementation sessions, and provide opportunities to showcase new strategies and initiatives. And once again, we’ll organize unique off-the-record roundtables that allow representatives of the private sector to meet face-to-face with government decision-makers, civil society, activists, and academics.
This year also marks the first year Access has opened up conference programming to the experts: our participants. We accepted and reviewed proposals* for innovative, thought-provoking, and outcome-oriented sessions. To help focus the expertise, interests, and creativity of the community, we took submissions under the following five working themes:

Measuring and preventing risk in the ICT sector

Tech solutions for human rights challenges

Innovations in digital rights

Internet governance reform

Restoring rights in the age of surveillance

With so many of our interactions, transactions, and experiences facilitated by digital tools, the opportunities, responsibilities, and risks for the tech sector are increasingly at the center of the discussion. While the rights to information, expression, association, health, and education are facilitated by technology, so too are major concerns involving privacy, surveillance, jurisdictional issues, and accountability.

WHY YOU SHOULD PARTICIPATE:
Located in the heart of technological innovation and providing an unparalleled learning, networking, and agenda-setting experience, RightsCon Silicon Valley will:

Create a space for open business-to-business dialogue on best practices and strategies. It will foster information sharing on legal and compliance issues, create opportunities for establishing effective coalitions, and highlight the emerging thinking in this complex and fast-moving space.

Develop a common language around emerging issues on a range of topics including security, digital due process, and internet governance. A shared understanding will enable actors from business, civil society, and government to have a clearer understanding of others’ positions, and in doing so, move the conversation towards implementation, alliances, and application.

Bring companies face-to-face with frontline actors to facilitate conversations between corporate representatives (including engineers) and some of their users. These conversations help ensure that products and services are more resilient when used by at-risk users, who are often not the primary demographic for which they have been designed.

Provide companies with principled guidance on implementing human rights in policy and practice. Rather than talking about or around issues, the RightsCon approach focuses conversations on what companies are actually being asked to do, and how they can limit liability and maximize rights-respecting use of their technologies.

Highlight emerging threats, opportunities, and new thinking, allowing participants to learn more about advances in the quickly changing discourse around human rights and technology, consider new perspectives on thorny issues, and have the information they need to better prepare for and mitigate upcoming challenges.

Build strategies and partnerships across stakeholder groups, providing an opportunity to discuss the future of the space within a group of participants with a relatively high level of assumed knowledge, allowing for the creation of strategic coalitions on identified issues. We will further link communities in a format that promotes collaboration and coalition-building within and across stakeholder groups.

Larry Stone - President, Group Public and Government Affairs, British Telecom (BT)

Del Harvey - Senior Director, Trust and Safety, Twitter

Moez Chakchouk - Founder of Tunisia's IXP and 404Labs

Eileen Donahoe, Former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Human Rights Council

Mitchell Baker - Chairperson, Mozilla

Many more being announced each week. For more details on speakers, head here.

*We recognize that we work in a fast changing industry, and have reserved a limited amount of space on the agenda for emerging issues. If you missed the submission deadline, but think you have an idea for a session that will add significantly to the quality of the conference, please email conference@accessnow.org.